Tender roasted sweet potatoes, savory chickpeas, and plenty of flavorful Middle Eastern spices go into these hearty sweet potato falafel burgers. These burgers pair beautifully with hummus or rich maple tahini sriracha sauce.
This recipe almost turned out to be a huge bummer. When you attempt to create something as crazy as a sweet potato falafel burger, the hopes can get pretty high, as mine did. I'd been thinking about this one for a while too, so they just grew and grew the whole time.
Sometimes that happens, and I put off posting for a while, because I keep thinking it'll be the most awesome recipe of all time, so I need to save it for a special occasion. In this case I saved it for a while...probably since some time around when I started playing around with pumpkin falafel.
If pumpkin works, I had to think sweet potatoes would too. I decided to make my sweet potato falafel in burger form, just to shake things up even more. Anyhow, I realized that winter is drawing to a close, so it was high time I started jamming in all the sweet potato goodness I could, before everyone becomes more interested in stuff like zucchini noodles.
Getting back to the whole bummer thing, I made the burger mixture up and it tasted great. I oiled up my skillet, threw in a couple of patties, and they totally stuck. They came out all misshapen and busted looking. Ugh. Of course, my husband and I ate them anyway, because we don't waste food because it's ugly.
See, sweet potato is tricky when using it for a veggie burger! It's delicious, but super soft. Sweet potato falafel burgers don't stand up to cooking nearly as well as my standard falafel burgers, or other types of veggie burgers like my favorite black bean burgers.
But these burgers, while a total mess, were delicious. While we're enjoying our beat up burgers (grumpily in my case), the remaining burger mixture sits in the fridge. After dinner I pop it out to cook up two more burgers, figuring we'd eat them for lunch the next day, hideous or not. Guess what happened? They didn't stick to the skillet! JOY.
So the moral of this story is that refrigeration is the key, unless you want a floppy old mess of a burger (and be my guest if you do). Also, don't write off your mistakes as failures. Maybe you'll learn from them. Or maybe they're unfinished successes. That's it for life lessons with me today. Oh, and eat these burgers. That too.
What to Serve with Sweet Potato Falafel Burgers
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Sweet Potato Falafel Burgers
Ingredients
- 1 medium sweet potato
- 1 small onion quartered
- 3 garlic cloves
- 1 cup cooked or canned chickpeas drained and rinsed
- ½ cup panko
-
¼
cup
chickpea flour
- ¼ cup fresh cilantro
- 1 tbsp. lemon juice
- 2 tbsp. olive oil divided
- 2 tsp. ground cumin
- 1 tsp. ground coriander
- ½ tsp. salt
- ¼ tsp. pepper
Instructions
-
Preheat oven to 400º. Scrub sweet potato and puncture several times with a knife. Bake until easily pierced with a knife, about 35 minutes. You want it to be slightly firmer than if you were going to eat it like a baked potato. Remove from oven, cut open and allow to cool.
-
Scoop sweet potato insides into food processor bowl and add onion, garlic, chickpeas, panko, chickpea flour, cilantro, lemon juice, 1 tablespoon of olive oil, cumin, coriander, salt and pepper. Pulse until chickpeas are well chopped and ingredients are incorporated, stopping to scrape down sides of bowl as needed.
-
Test a bit of the mixture by pressing it together with your hands. If it doesn't quite hold together, transfer mixture to a bowl, cover, and refrigerate at least 30 minutes.
-
Shape the sweet potato mixture into 4 patties.
-
Coat a large skillet with remaining oil and place over medium heat. Working in batches if needed, place patties into skillet and cook until browned on bottoms, about 5 minutes. Flip and cook until browned on opposite sides, about 5 minutes more.
-
Stuff into buns and top with your favorite burger/falafel toppings. I recommend some hummus or tahini dressing.
Wow, these look so good!
Ahh! These are beautiful! I'm drooling!
You had me at maple tahini sriracha sauce, but the burgers look pretty good too! So many perfect flavours in here, I can't wait to make this. Pinned and on the must-make list.
Do you think you could make a large batch of these to freeze, or would cooking after being frozen ruin the flavor/texture?
You could probably freeze them. What I've done with some other falafel recipes is prepare the burger mixture and freeze it before cooking. Then I thaw it out on the day I'm ready to serve, shape into patties and cook them up.
HOW DID IT TURN OUT?
Dude. DUUUUDE. These look absolutely divine. I want two right now!
I am always on the look out for yummy black bean-less veggie burger recipes! This looks fabulous! And super delicious!! :)
I made these last night with the Tahini Siracha Maple sauce. Delicious! Burgers/patties are my favourite evening meal and this dish flew up into the top 3 immediately. The sauce will have to be for special occasions only or I would make it everyday with all.the.things
Thank you for this!
Yay! I've made the tahini maple sriracha sauce a whole bunch of times - it can be pretty addictive. Glad you liked everything. Thanks Shelly!
Could I substitute chickpea flour for wholemeal flour?
I'm not sure if that would work, as I haven't tried it, but in my experience you don't get quite the same consistency with wheat flour as chickpea flour. The chickpea flour also adds some flavor, whereas I'm thinking wheat flour would dull the flavor a bit. I think you'd be better off just adding extra panko breadcrumbs until you get the right consistency.
These look great! what buns did you use?
Thank you! If I remember correctly, those are Nature's Own whole wheat buns.
I made these last night and they were AWESOME! My sweet potato came out a little "chunky-er" than your picture but absolutely delicious all the same, thank you for sharing :)
Yay! I really loved these burgers. Glad to hear you enjoyed them too! Thanks Anna!
This recipe is amazing! I actually baked instead of pan frying them and it stayed together wonderfully! Refrigerated a little longer though :)
Awesome! Glad you enjoyed them, and thanks for letting me know that baking them worked out - I always get questions on that!
noice
Thank you. :)
I just made these today and was really excited but my patties came out really soft and seemed "undone" in the center. Is the consistency supposed to be soft?
They're softer than meat-based burgers but not super soft. If they come out super soft try blending the mixture less, so it's still pretty chunky, shaping the patties so they're a bit thinner, or cooking them a bit longer. :)
Could I use almond meal or unbleached all-purpose flour instead of chickpea? I don't have chickpea on hand.
All-purpose should work! I'm not sure about almond meal though.
Ok thanks. If I find the batter isn't coming together but I don't have time to refrigerate, do you think adding an egg would help?
These look amazing! Two of my favorite things falafel and sweet potato! *drool* I can’t want to make these. This could be something I could make ahead (the day before or morning of) and keep the mixture in the fridge right? Or take the mixture camping?
You can absolutely store the mixture in the fridge overnight - I do it all the time! And I think it would be fine for camping if you have a pan. Let me know how it works out!
Can you give me a rough guestimate on the weight of a medium sweet potato? I keep coming home with these mutant sweet spuds which are weighing in at like 700g! Made a batch of these with a rather large sp and although delicious they were probably softer than they should have been
Oh wow! 700 grams would be way too much! Shoot for about 250g/8.8oz.
Hi Alissa, I found this recipe through Lisa Lansing and I am totally in love with it. I cut it into strips and put it on a homemade flatbread with some tahini dressing. OMG it's so freaking good. Thank you.